Whether you're running a small business, working on B2B, or playing a role in a larger organization, customers are the single most important part of running your business. Without them, you likely wouldn't have a business. To earn more customers and keep the old ones coming around, you constantly need to reinvent yourself. Providing value and quality to your customers is part of the equation. You must also have powerful marketing strategies in place to ensure you reach the proper target audience. A worthwhile and well-tested method of engaging with customers is to use promotional pens to reach out to your audience. Here's how to use them to connect with your customers and keep them coming back to your business.

How Pens Help You Connect With Customers

Pens are useful for connecting with customers and cultivating personal relationships with them. There's nothing quite like a free, usable item to demonstrate the value of a brand. Plus, offering customers such a tangible, useful, and highly visible item can generate impressions of your business when they use it around others. Building meaningful connections with customers isn't always a straightforward process. But pens can enhance your reputation, spread a marketing message, and ultimately help you connect with customers in a cost-effective, efficient way.

Adding Your Logo

To get the most value from investing in promotional pens, you must customize it with your logo, alongside some form of contact information. Logos have a profound effect on potential customers, primarily because people make brand/shopping decisions on an emotional level instead of based on an analysis of the brand itself. A highly visual, yet simple, logo can appeal to customers and reinforce the idea of your brand. It also helps customers associate your brand with positive emotions. Familiarity plays a key role in how consumers choose brands as well, so crafting a logo that has these attributes is crucial for success. After designing the best logo possible, place it on your pens to start spreading your message to new audiences and customers alike.

Personalizing Pens

Another great way to market with pens is to personalize them to your clientele. Not only does this add another layer to your marketing, it gives customers more value. Depending on the scope of your campaign, you can offer engraved pens for a small cost. Alternatively, you can personalize each pen before handing them out to someone at a tradeshow. Offering pens with different and varied colors can also act as a sort of personalization. Different colors convey certain messages and moods, making them ideal for marketing. For example, orange can mean confident, greenhl means healthy, yellow means confident, gray means professional, and so on. Customers often base their purchase on colors as well, so using color theory as part of your pen personalization can unlock exciting new marketing opportunities to use for marketing with pens and other items.

Offering Different Kinds of Pens

The key to a successful marketing campaign that revolves around pins or other promotional items is offering some variety. Although you can stick with the traditional ballpoint pens that many companies use, you don't have to. You can branch out of bed and offer something more unique that catches the eye. Perhaps a stylus-tip pen would offer more value to your customers. Maybe a pen with a flashlight tip will be more memorable. Perhaps you can offer gel pens or metal pens to truly reinforce your point. All of them are convenient and easy to customize, giving you plenty of options to work with as you develop your overall strategy. Whatever you do, be sure to offer them as part of a range of unique logo pens to truly hit the mark.

Distributing Pens

Customizing pens and knowing your logo is only half the battle. You must also consider a distribution method for your pens. Here are a few of the best avenues of distribution:

• In your store(s)
• Sell them online, in-store, or through the mail
• Through a social media contest
• As a loyalty program gift
• Mailed to them as a "thank you" gift
• Distribute them at trade shows
• Give them away at conferences
• Gift them to employees and professional colleagues

Distributing your pens plays a pivotal role in executing your marketing plan. Without a means of distribution and way to get your pens into the hands of your customers, they won't be very effective. So don't forget to take the time to develop this as part of your strategy during the planning stage to ensure the results you want in the end.